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Zimbra experience on a Mac

I recently began experimenting with Zimbra with a little startup. There are some inherent challenges: mostly Mac users (me - XP/Linux only), poor testers, poor communicators and tech phobic. We are spread around the country and have no Remote Desktop Sharing ability.

For these reasons, I'm not quite sure how to interpret the following feedback I received today:

Just FYI, with Zimbra on a Mac, you have to deal with each email. There is no place and no way to click on a group and delete or move, such as with Yahoo. Its a real pain actually. If you click on an email, it opens it too. I'm just not that impressed with it I hate to say.

It's totally unclear to me if this person is referring to the Zimbra web interface, or to a client on her Mac (Entourage or Thunderbird). Nor do I even know how these client apps are actually supposed to handle these kinds of functions.

Can someone do me a favor and help me interpret what might be happening and what to recommend? Even with all of these uncertainties, I'm 99% certain this is just a training issue, but for various reasons I need to do my best to suck it up and hold their hand.

I would hazzard a guess to say that the user would rather use the local client interface than the Webbased one.

"There is no place and no way to click on a group and delete or move..."
Not sure what the user is referreing to, as me using latest Firefox via Macbook running MACOSX 10.4.7 , I can select a group of messages and move/drag them just like you can in Entourage, Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Mac-Mail.

"If you click on an email, it opens it too"
Uh, what's the user reffering to here? Single clicking doesn't open a message, only selects it but double clicking will, just like in the other
e-mail programs. ( shrug )

I would probably suspect a learning curve issue really but, always good to spend a little time to make sure the user isn't having another issue like browser misconfig issue or something else.

I think you need to talk with the user a bit more so that you are clear about what his/her issues are. I suspect this person just isn't familiar with Zimbra's capabilities and a bit of enlightenment might help.

If the person is talking about moving emails around in the web client you should probably demonstrate the "drag and drop" features of the Zimbra client as well as the "right-click" access to functions. This person may be used to not having those types of features in a web client.

And of course you can select multiple emails by holding down the [Ctrl] key while selecting them and then dragging the lot of them to your intended destination, be it another folder or trash or where ever.

Maybe a good place to start would be to direct them to the excellent flash demo available on the Zimbra website. I find this a good way to familiarize a user with the web client's capabilities.

Very good suggestions, of course. As you can tell, I'm pretty limited by my own minimal Mac experience, and lack of access to existing Mac client setup documentation. Otherwise yes, a five-minute conversation would probably do wonders.

Is the CTRL-select (or SHIFT-select for that matter) a standard Mac OSX offering, and can it possibly have been disabled in this instance? And is it possible she may have configured her Mac OSX to invoke the equivalent of a double-click with a single click (recalling the single mouse button I have seen)?

I'll definitely test the waters by sending the Flash demo her way. I feel pretty silly asking these Mac 101 questions, but I'm going to be stuck with the situation for a while and am trying to just make the best of it.

Is the CTRL-select (or SHIFT-select for that matter) a standard Mac OSX offering, and can it possibly have been disabled in this instance?

I personally don't know if it can be disabled but yes that is a standard OS X offering just like in Windows.

Originally Posted by silurius

And is it possible she may have configured her Mac OSX to invoke the equivalent of a double-click with a single click (recalling the single mouse button I have seen)?

I don't believe there is any way to configure a single click to a double click. Having one mouse button does not have much to do with single or double clicking. On a Mac with only one mouse button you have to use the CTRL key while clicking to activate the "right" click of a mouse. On that note however, 90% of the Mac users I am friends with replace the one button mouse with a two button mouse. Might be something she should look into.

Originally Posted by silurius

I feel pretty silly asking these Mac 101 questions, but I'm going to be stuck with the situation for a while and am trying to just make the best of it.

Don't! You don't have any experience with them. How are you supposed to know?

One thing I am wondering is of course like you said is she referring to a local mail client or the web interface? OR is she even for sure on OS X? God help her if she's still using OS 9...

shift-select on the mac selects a range, while alt-select acts like crtl-select on the PC and selects/deselects whatever message you are over. We couldn't use ctrl-select because ctrl-left-click on the mac is equiv to right-click.